Why do we get injured doing stupid stuff?

Why does it always seem to be the silliest of things that cause the worst injuries? 

For instance, I’ve fallen on my horse every which way possible and nearly always been fine after (a bit sore but otherwise fine) yet once I put my shoulder out reaching for a pen! I feel like I can’t be the only one this has happened to. (Right? Please tell me I’m not the only person that it has happened to.)

There are a few reasons this happens 

1. Sheer bad luck – in some cases, it’s just the way you land or the circumstances of how it happened, we cannot control this and I think we will all have an injury like this at some point in our lives
2. Putting strain on a weakness that you may or may not already know about – our bodies are full of muscular imbalances. We may know about some i.e. the dominant hand. Others we may not be so aware of, but if you put excessive force through one of those weak areas without your body being prepped, it is likely that this will cause it to give way i.e. changing direction quickly causing an ACL injury But even if an area is not weak, you can develop an injury from overuse, for example, repetitive strain injury or tendonitis.
3. Ignoring/ previous injury – one of the biggest predictors of injury is previous injury, so if you have injured somewhere before unless you maintain it, you are likely to injure it again. Also, if you have a niggly pain, that’s been hanging around for a long time that you have not gotten seen to or worked on the likelihood is that I will eventually go 
4. Ageing- as we age we are more at risk of injury as we are more prone to sarcopenia (muscle breakdown) and osteopenia (bone breakdown) so things that would never have affected us before can lead to injury.

Often the first thing people do when they have an injury is to rest it, but If you’ve been resting an injury or a niggle and it’s STILL not gone away, you NEED to read this.

So here’s the thing (in most cases) once the initial inflammation has gone down you need to start building the area back up. The longer you leave it the worse it will become. So you are actually doing more damage by leaving it alone.

But that’s not all, You may develop a similar issue on the opposite side as you have either consciously or unconsciously used that side more and more to avoid aggravating the original injury

In the case of my shoulder, It was number 3 that happened to me. I had a previous shoulder injury and once the injury went away I stopped doing the exercises to maintain it. My shoulder became weak again and eventually, the injury came back. It’s hard to continue doing the exercises when you feel ok.

And of course, you’re probably going to say that you “don’t have time for strength training” or “It’s not that bad anyway.” but often these kinds of exercises can be done while you are sitting at home watching telly or scrolling on your phone.

So it’s not that you don’t actually have time, it’s just not become painful enough to be a priority.

People often ignore these things until their bodies cannot compensate for them anymore and a bigger injury is caused. Do you really want to be sidelined for weeks or even months when as little as 20 mins a day could make the world of difference?

I know that if my shoulder starts to get sore again that I need to get on top of my exercises before it turns into something worse. I’ve also worked them into my warm-up when I train my upper body so that I am constantly staying ahead of this. I know what will happen if I don’t.

As I said before some injuries happen just because of bad luck but we need to put ourselves in the best position possible to avoid all the other scenarios. By doing resistance training we can do this. We will strengthen our muscles and bones. Protect our joints and tendons and strengthen imbalances and keep old injuries from reappearing.

This can be done with 20-40 mins a few times a week, does that not seem worth it to keep you from having to spend 2-6 weeks or more out of action?